Timothy Buckwalters Endless Encyclopedia.

(or : Everything as Weapon against Illusory Happiness.) (or: '"It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy." Pablo Picasso.')

Timothy Buckwalters underlying modus operandi is an encyclopedic one. This means that knowledge is gathered and arranged into a kind of system. This is a systematic nature that ordinates the world, puts it into a special machine to compute a new kind of quasi divine database consciousness. It is like a Hegelian God, or at least a make believe God according to the philosophy of Georg Hegel , and it is a likeness that works by engendering an ever growing body of organized knowledge or at least intuitively collecting the impressive semblage of one. (Yes, semblage is a made up word, but it is a good made up word to describe a pretend assemblage of knowledge that vies with fragmented and partial perceptions of the real.) All this is manifest visually in complex groupings of artworks, all intertwined (or mixed) with a mind blowingly complete, yet idiosyncratic, musical sensibility. In his new work, the artworks are shown as collections of objects ('packs'), some of which appear intended for use by particular agents in some general conspiracy. However in contrast to the all consuming vent of an American libertarian type consciousness these collections speak of things lyrically, intuitively. They are more Jean Luc Godard than Alex Jones*, as unlike Jones, who also appears initially to have his large feet planted in opposing world views, they allow their paranoia to become inclusive of difference. What we find is a 'shared collection consciousness' at work rather than the attempt to empower an inappropriate and heavily armed 'collective individual consciousness', the kind of consciousness that we find in the powerful persuasion machine of Jones's libertarian ranting based as it is on a rural idyll of

individual citizens packing guns. In Buckwalter's 'shared collection consciousness' Art itself is offered as a kind of readymade ammunition dump, a kind of artistic arms cache of contained affectivity. A treasure trove of 'mental fight'*. Through this approach Buckwalter is able to propose new pragmatic art work that speak of readiness for conflict, because many of these packs indicate and articulate an artificial kind of guerilla warfare.

His work, then, indicates a new kind of aggressive survival and attack machine, a system that uses paranoid consciousness, firstly as an intelligence gathering tool, (which includes everything in its net) then as an united energy that exploits arts ability to contain and generate affects. Affects are simply those things which can affect us the most and so, in this case, we find ourselves looking at both the sharp objects of dangerous minds from which nothing escapes and also a surprisingly emotional (if parodic) exploration of the comedy of human relationships. Nothing escapes. (Paradoxically it's this nothing in itself that becomes the potential cause of new and different emotions, but this paradox is probably too philosophical a drift to be of much explicative use faced with Buckwalters dystopian and demotic energy.) By endlessly contextualizing and then including the burden of that all inclusive context as a weapon within the work itself, he display sharpened awareness, awareness able to cut through the genteel hypocrisies of normal life, cut through the hypocrisies that enable the abuses caused by the general establishment of comforting illusion. Finally it seems to me that this work evokes endless war against the happy dreams that try and smother real engagement, any real shared participation in life (or art), at birth. In real contrast to alarming libertarian 'group think' this anti-liberal challenge is one that aims squarely at provoking endless free thought; free thought without specific aim. It is art, and through art potentially life itself, as intuitive activity in time and upsetting emotional source, that is set free in these collections.

The generous way Buckwalter often packages his work into packs or groupings, to enable imaginary left wing paranoid war machines to operate and become conscious, is clearly exemplary and meant to be. These packs include a range of reading materials, images and artworks by himself and other artists, all testifying to the endlessly inclusive ( if discriminating) nature of his gathering , and operating a kind of subjective implosion of this everything into the productive lie of a potential explosion. Fusion. They package a horizon of necessary operational knowledge, and in so doing indicate it as the basis of an event. This is the kind of charitable activity that actually enables free thought because it is a creative way of taking

thinking cleanly through the general fog of smiley common sense to a kind of monstrously informed and unjustifiable clarity. ( A clarity informed by a productive vulnerability that blackmails and takes down the bluster of collective libertarian rage and the bureaucracy of normalised 'art practice' through the diffuse yet cutting nature of art work itself. This is critical paranoia.) The kind of black humour that results from all this is a kind of dire comedy that becomes the vehicle for all sorts of challenges in every direction, so that the implicit potential for violence finally becomes irritatingly liberating and is actually, at the end of the day, a polite artistic request for the rigour of a complex and thoughtful peace, for a collapsed state in which anxiety and fear are finally mediated and we can feel and act in a fresh and open way. Or not.
*Alex Jones. Jones is an influential Radio and internet personality exposing a 'red meat' US libertarianism. *William Blake.' Jerusalem.